07/22/2010

Review: 'Father of the Rain' By Lily King

“Father of the Rain” By Lily King Atlantic, 360 pp., $24.00

Reviewed by Wendy Smith, special to the Tribune

Lily King won a well-deserved raft of honors, including the prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award, for her first two novels, “The Pleasing Hour” and “The English Teacher,” and her latest is just as sensitive and perceptive. Indeed, this harrowing chronicle of Daley Amory’s 34-year struggle to come to grips with her impossible father may be her best yet.

It’s not just that Gardiner Amory is an alcoholic with a nasty temper. It’s not just that he’s a bigot who comments when he sees Daley with a book by Judy Blume, “You’re always reading the Jews. Just like your mother.” It’s not just that he mocks any achievement of Daley’s or her older brother Garvey’s that doesn’t involve sports. It’s not just that he reads aloud an explicit letter in Penthouse Forum to his 11-year-old daughter and the 6-year-old daughter of his new wife Catherine, goes skinny-dipping in front of them and lets them see him fondling Catherine’s breasts in the pool.

The worst thing about this adult man with the self-control of a toddler is that when he needs to, he can display just enough charm and vulnerability to ensure that his daughter won’t walk out on him the way her mother does as the novel opens in 1974 and Catherine does 18 years later.* Daley narrates “Father of the Rain,” and the author does a brilliant job of letting her own words—unsparing in depicting Gardiner’s misdeeds, critical of his values—reveal an attachment she cannot relinquish. When she tells her boyfriend Jonathan, “My father has no power over me,” we know it’s not true.

Indeed, 29-year-old Daley blows off a professorship at Berkeley to come home to the Boston suburb of Ashing and tend to Dad, who has been fired due to his nonstop drinking after Catherine’s departure. This happens in Part II, and it’s initially hard to understand why on earth she would do it after the grisly events of Part I, which chronicles the months between the summer her parents split up and an awful spring vacation in St. Thomas with newlyweds Dad and Catherine. Readers will share Jonathan’s incredulity when Daley decides after her father’s manipulative suicide attempt (the pills his note said “should do the trick” turn out to be seven aspirin) that she can help him get sober.

Part II is this excellent novel’s strongest section, because it most fully explores the painful ambivalence of wounded people. “I am fixing something with my father that got destroyed when I was eleven years old,” Daley tells a friend, and it’s a particularly nice touch that occasional (but fairly frequent) comments make it clear she blames her decent, responsible mother for that destruction. Mom’s mild faults pale in comparison to Dad’s drunken abusiveness, but Daley still hasn’t forgiven her for leaving him. A woman who was hit by a car and killed nine years ago is still, “my mother who loved me but did not protect me.”

The person she didn’t protect Daley from, of course, was Dad, but it’s Dad for whom Daley gives up her job and alienates the man she loves. (Jonathan comes to see her in Ashing and storms off when she won’t go with him.) It’s horrifyingly plausible that she can be yanked back into the swamp of her father’s needs by the delusion that somehow this time it will be different. For a while, it seems that it might. Dad grudgingly attends AA meetings, because it’s the only way he can keep Daley around, and he tersely opens up to her about his alcoholic mother and abusive stepfather. He’s hurt his children because he was hurt, and we feel sorry for him.

But he hasn’t really changed. “Please don’t go around trying to paint this town commie red,” he tells Daley—in 1992!—after she’s asked someone to call her Ms. The worst thing he can think of to say about his estranged son is, “the guy will be lucky to get into the Rotary Club someday.” He loves his daughter when she plays tennis with him at the country club, or throws him a catered surprise party, but he has no respect for her opinions, and he requires uncritical approval she can’t supply. When he tells Daley that Barbara Bridgeton, a neighbor’s wife who keeps coming over with meals in Tupperware containers, doesn’t believe he has a drinking problem, we can see what’s coming.

King gives us the messy complexities of family without tidying them up or providing neat morals. We come to see that Daley was in an odd way liberated by the detour she took from her carefully organized existence to patch up her damaged father. However badly it ended (and it was bad), it didn’t ruin her life; it didn’t even end their relationship, though there’s a 15-year gap between Part II and the novel’s brief closing section. The moving final pages depict a reconciliation all the more realistic because no one dramatically repents or forgives; they simply acknowledge bonds that can’t be broken.

Wendy Smith is a contributing editor at the American Scholar and frequent book reviewer.